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THE twelfth chapter of E. R. Eddison’s first novel, The Worm Ouroboros, contains a curious episode extraneous to the main plot. Having spent nearly all their strength in climbing Koshtra Pivrarcha, the highest mountain pinnacle on waterish Mercury, the Lords Juss and Brandoch Daha stand idly enjoying the glory of their singular achievement atop the frozen wind-whipped summit, and they gaze away southward into a mysterious land never before seen:

Juss looked southward where the blue land stretched in fold upon fold of rolling country, soft and misty, till it melted in the sky. ‘Thou and I,’ said he, ‘first of the children of men, now behold with living eyes the fabled land of Zimiamvia. Is that true, thinkest thou, which philosophers tell us of that fortunate land: that no mortal foot may tread it, but the blessed souls do inhabit it of the dead that be departed, even they that were great upon earth and did great deeds when they were living, that scorned not earth and the delights and the glories thereof, and yet did justly and were not dastards nor yet oppressors?’

‘Who knoweth?’ said Brandoch Daha, resting his chin in his hand and gazing south as in a dream. ‘Who shall say he knoweth?’

The land of Zimiamvia probably held only a fleeting and evanescent place in the minds of Eddison’s readers in 1922, because this, the first and last mentioning of Zimiamvia in Ouroboros, flits quickly past the reader, and though it has a local habitation and a name, it does not have a place in the story. Yet in the author’s mind, the name rooted itself so deeply that its engendering and growth cannot be clearly traced. Where did this name and this land come from? How and when was Zimiamvia born? How, while writing Ouroboros in 1921, did Eddison come to think of including this extraneous description of a land inconsequential to the story? Why did he include it?

Who knows? Who shall say he knows? No living person can answer these questions with certainty. What is certain is that Zimiamvia existed in Eddison’s imagination for at least twenty-three years and that he spent much of the rare leisure time of his last fifteen years writing three novels to give tangible shape to that misty land whose existence the Lords Juss and Brandoch Daha ponder and question in those moments on the ice-clad jagged peak of Koshtra Pivrarcha.

When he finished Ouroboros in 1922, Eddison did not ride the hippogriff-chariot through the heavens to Zimiamvian shores directly. Instead he remained firmly earth-bound and wrote Styrbiorn the Strong, a historical romance based on the life of the Swedish prince Styrbiorn Starki, the son of King Olaf, who died in 983 in an attempt to usurp the kingdom from his uncle, King Eric the Victorious. Eddison finished this novel in December 1925, and on 3 January 1926, during a vacation to Devonshire, he found himself desiring to pay homage to the Icelandic sagas that had inspired so many aspects of Ouroboros and Styrbiorn the Strong: ‘Walking in a gale over High Peak Sidmouth … I thought suddenly that my next job should be a big saga translation, and that should be Egil.’ After noting his decision, he justified it: ‘This may pay back some of my debt to the sagas, to which I owe more than can ever be counted.’ Resolved on this project, he steeped himself for five years in the literary and historical scholarship requisite for translating a thirteenth-century Icelandic text into English. It was not until 1930, after Egil’s Saga had been finished and dispatched to the Cambridge University Press, that Eddison focused his attention on the new world that had lain nearly dormant in his mind since at least 1921. Eddison finished the first Zimiamvian novel, Mistress of Mistresses, in 1935. Faber & Faber published it in England; E. P. Dutton published it in America. Eddison says Mistress of Mistresses did not explore ‘the relations between that other world and our present here and now’, and so his ideas of those relations propelled him to write a second novel setting some scenes in Zimiamvia and others in modern Europe. Eddison finished this second novel, A Fish Dinner in Memison, in 1940, but the wartime paper shortage prevented Faber & Faber from publishing it, yet E. P. Dutton published it for American readers in 1941. Eddison says that writing this second novel made him ‘fall in love with Zimiamvia’, and since ‘love has a searching curiosity which can never be wholly satisfied’, the new ideas sprouting from his love grew into The Mezentian Gate.

Eddison never finished this third Zimiamvian novel, for he died from a massive stroke in 1945. He intended The Mezentian Gate to have thirty-nine chapters. Between 1941 and 1945, he wrote the first seven, the last four, and Chapters XXVIII and XXIX. Like many others, Eddison feared a German invasion of England, and he worried that events beyond his control would prevent his finishing The Mezentian Gate. So before November 1944, he wrote an Argument with Dates, a complete and detailed plot synopsis of all of the unwritten chapters. After completing the Argument and thus assuring himself that his novel’s story, at least, could be published as a whole even if something happened to him, Eddison went on to write drafts for several more chapters during his last year of life. In 1958 his brother Colin Eddison, his friend Sir George Rostrevor Hamilton and Sir Francis Meynell (the founder of the Nonesuch Press and son of the poet Alice Meynell) privately published this fragmentary novel at the Curwen Press in Plaistow, West Sussex. The Curwen edition included only the finished chapters and the Argument; it did not include the substantial number of preliminary drafts for unfinished chapters that Eddison composed between January and August 1945. These drafts, extant in handwritten leaves, have lain in the darkness of manuscript boxes in the underground stacks of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and they have been read by few since Eddison’s death.

In Dell’s 1992 edition, Eddison’s neglected manuscript drafts for The Mezentian Gate were finally brought into the light of print, and for the first time the three Zimiamvian novels were pressed within the covers of one volume and united under the title Zimiamvia.